The Large Hadron Collider, the baddest monster machine around, recently made a matter known as quark-gluon plasma. It's a hundred thousand times hotter than the inside of the sun and denser than anything in the universe, except black holes.

Quark-gluon plasma—other than sounding cool as hell—is what scientists believe the entire universe was like immediately after the Big Bang. It's made up of quarks, which are the elementary building blocks of positive charged protons and neutral neutrons and gluons, particles that glue quarks together using the strong force. A physicist says that "if you had a cubic centimeter of this stuff, it would weigh 40 billion tons."

To make that magic matter, the LHC was used to smash together lead ions at nearly the speed of light. Scientists did it in hopes of gaining a better feel and understanding for what happened to quark-gluon plasma as the universe cooled. And to play God, of course. [National Geographic]